Leaving
by Banfennid
Summary: Ghanima and Farad'n fight over the path of the future.


Notes: Written for a challenge by FireWillow: Silk, Blood, Leather. I've added "in order of appearance" for myself. I like working with an older Leto & Ghanima, so this is Movie!DuneVerse continued in the vein of Book!DuneVerse. I'm also fairly certain I mispelled Sha'hulud; my copies of the books are packed away in a box at the moment. I got Sardaukar right!

Disclaimer: I'm not making any money. Back off.

Archiving: Don't even think about it without asking me first.

Feedback: Is appreciated.

~*~

_"As my mother was not wife, you shall never be husband."_

_"Politics?"_

_"Politics. But in time, there may be love... which is more than my brother will have."_

~*~

"You cannot leave." She saw the sun setting in the picture window behind him, the bed canopy billowing in the cooling air.

"Yet I am," he said, his back to her, dressed for desert travel. "I go by worm tonight to Sietch Tabr, with Stilgar."

She could see he was taking nothing from his room at the palace except what could fit into one small bag, and from what she knew of this quiet, patient boy, it was more than likely filled with pen, ink, and paper. Did he know how much of Irulan he had in him? Did they both grow from under Wensicia's shadow?

"Leto won't allow it," she declared.

"He will."

Anger welled in her chest at his calm certainty. "And what of his plans for us?" she asked.

"You mean his resurrection of the Bene Gesserit breeding program?" he said bitterly. "Making the Prince of House Corrino the bound concubine of his sister? The irony is not lost on me."

"You tread on dangerous ground, Farad'n."

He finally turned around and met her eyes. He'd stopped wearing the contact lenses that hid his longtime use of melange, and while she knew about, it startled her to see it. "We are alone, Ghanima. I would not use such a tone in front of others. Have you lost all respect for me with Leto's return?"

"Why would he go along with this?" she said, ignoring his question.

"It suits Atreides sovereignty if I am not seen at court for a time," he answered as he continued to pack.

"That's for the Landsraad." She crossed her arms over her chest, annoyed by the runaround he was giving her. "What is the real reason?"

Farad'n picked up his cloak from the bed and swung it over his shoulders in a wide arc, sending the smell of the desert across the space between them. He buckled the clasp and sighed. "The Emperor will give me my sabbatical because I stood in the Great Hall and gave my blessing as I watched him marry my wife."

Ghanima stared at him in shock. She knew that he and her brother had regular meetings, that they'd discussed Leto's plans for Arrakis and the Empire, but this betrayed an intimacy between them that she had never considered. "I was not your wife," she said weakly, unable to break his gaze.

"You should have been."

The conviction and bite in his voice, so foreign coming from his mouth, raised her temper once more. "Is that what I am to you? Some prize that has been lost?"

"Would you have done it?" He advanced on her. "Would you really have slit my throat as we lay on silk sheets in the wedding chamber? After I offered you my life on the steps, and you spared it?"

"Yes."

He raised his eyebrows and chuckled, and her cheeks grew hot. Jessica had taught him to spot a lie from across a room, and she'd been foolish to think he wouldn't see her dishonesty now. She braced herself, but he took it no further, switching topics instead.

"This is my home now, and I am a stranger in it."

"So you're running away?"

"I was born in exile, reared by an army of Sardaukar and a mother driven by rage. My only bridge to the world was my books, and now I have been charged by the Emperor to create books of my own. The Royal Scribe cannot write about others if he barely knows himself." He picked up his satchel from the bed. "You and I both need time to discover who we truly are."

"I know who I am," she said, crossing her arms over her chest.

"Without Leto?"

She blanched. "We've been separated before. That's how you came to be here, remember?"

"And you spent that time hearing his voice in the wind and thirsting for my blood." He put his hands on her shoulders. "He is transforming, Ghanima. Soon he will be lost to you forever, roaming the planet in the skin of Sha'hulud. He may have the agony of the Golden Path, but you have the sorrow of being left behind."

She closed her eyes to his painful revelation and recited the litany in her mind, sensing her composure slipping away. She felt him lean forward and put his lips to her ear.

"You would not have killed me," he whispered, "because we are a match." He then pressed something made of soft leather into her hands.

She could not bear to look at him, and so held on tightly to herself until the swish of his cloak went past her through the door. When he was safely gone, she saw what he had given her wrapped in the weathered hide: the seal of House Corrino.

She made her way gingerly to his bed and sat down, the occasional sacrilegious tear dripping unnoticed down her face. Her fingers traced over one of his pillows, and she picked it up and breathed the last of him in, knowing the next time they met he would smell not like this boy from Salusa Secundus, but like the desert after a storm -- whether rain or sand, she did not know.


End file.
